The Time Traveler's Guide to Creative Anachronism
by sqbr
Summary: In which the author overcomes the inherent age difference in Amy/River with the help of time travel, much to the Doctor's dismay. Some River/Eleven/Amy or maybe Eleven/Amy and Eleven/River subtext.
1. Chapter 1

Note: This chapter consists of the first two chapters of the fic as uploaded to AO3. It was written just after "The Time of Angels", though the fic overall is set just after "Cold Blood"

* * *

Amy met River Song again in the 22nd century at the University of Surrey.

In theory they were just passing through on their way to see the rebuilt Guildford Cathedral: it was apparently a "perfect example of post-invasion architecture". Which didn't sound very exciting, but if there were two things Amy had learned from her travels with the Doctor, it was that things never went according to plan, and that whatever actually happened once they went awry was generally very exciting indeed.

And sure enough, they'd barely stepped out of the TARDIS before the Doctor had started babbling something about satellites and sentient electromagnetic waves and he'd co-opted some random academic to help him commandeer the radio telescope. Unfortunately, while she had no intention of "staying in the TARDIS where it's safe" he'd somehow managed to give Amy the slip somewhere in the physics department, and after wandering about aimlessly for a while she had decided she might as well get herself some lunch.

Of course it was only after she'd piled her tray with what appeared to be some sort of green tofu curry with rice (at least, she hoped it was rice, since it was green too) and gotten through the queue to the checkout that it occurred to her that all her money was nearly two centuries out of date.

"That's alright," said the woman behind her, "I'll pay."

Amy turned around and was greeted with a knowing grin from an oddly familiar looking blonde. "Oh, that's very kind," said Amy, "but you needn't...I have a friend who can get me some lunch later. When I can find him."

"Don't worry about it," said the woman, "I'll consider myself paid back several times over if you can tell me where you got that _fantastic_ outfit."

"Oh, you know..." said Amy, demurring, as they walked towards a table, "just some shop."

"I doubt that," said the woman, sitting down "That's authentic turn of the 21st century fashion, or at least a very good replica. And look at your tights! Are they real nylon?"

Crap. Nobody else had ever said anything about her clothes, why did she have to stand in line in front of a smarty pants like...Amy looked closer and realised who she was sitting with. River was much younger, no older than her mid twenties, but it was definitely her. Ha! The doctor was going to be _freaked_.

"Ok, I admit it," said Amy, "I'm a big 21st century re-enactment nerd. I and my friends like to dress up like people from a hundred and eighty years ago and then we have big parties and...talk on our mobile phones and complain about global warming. It's a bit embarrassing really."

River laughed and Amy was suddenly struck by how _pretty_ she was. Not that grown-up bossing-around-the-Doctor River wasn't attractive too in her way, but on the whole Amy preferred people her own age. Well, who at least _looked_ like they were her own age, added a traitorous little voice she decided she wasn't paying attention to.

"That's certainly an _odd_ hobby, but I can think of plenty that are more embarrassing," said River, "And I'm not going to judge anyone for being obsessed with the past, I'm doing a degree in Ancient History. At least you get to mess about with clothes, all I ever seem to do is read a bunch of musty books."

"Yes, I can see how that might get a bit dull," said Amy, "Have you ever considered archeology?"

The Doctor found them two hours later in the campus bar, where a conversation about differing cultural attitudes to psychoactive substances had led to the sampling of a range of beers which granted the drinker mild touch telepathy, and this of course had led to experiments with trying to figure out how many fingers the other was holding behind their back while kissing them.

"Hello, Amy," he said in a cheerful tone tinged with just a hint of disapproval, "I see you've made a friend. Anyway, crisis averted, all I had to do was OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU DOING THAT'S RI..." and then he opened and closed his mouth a few times like a fish before closing it firmly and glaring at her _very significantly_.

"Right," said Amy, "River, it was _incredibly_ nice meeting you but I have to go. Doc...You, you need to give me one decapound ninepence to pay her back for lunch."

"No, really, it's fine, I consider myself more than repaid," River grinned. "Is this another of your re-enactment friends? I think what you guys do is marvellous. Look at that bow-tie! Though I'm not sure it's quite period with those shoes."

"You're absolutely right, very lax of me. I must invest in some spats. And now I'm very sorry to rush off but we _have to go_."

Amy regretfully made her goodbyes and was frogmarched by the Doctor back to the TARDIS.

"What were you thinking?" he shouted, "She hasn't even met me...us yet. And you _know_ she's not meant to meet you at all until much, much later. You could cause a rift in the space-time continuum!"

"All we know is that she didn't seem to _recognise_ me when we met in the future. And there's no reason she'd remember some random snog in a bar twenty years later now is there?"

"And that's another thing, what on earth possessed you to kiss my..that is...it's just not ethical," he said primly.

"Oh you're absolutely right. I mean she's at least, what...two, three years older than me? Not like you and her, I mean you're...how old again?"

"Nine hundred and seven," he muttered darkly. "But that's not what I meant and you know it."

"_Nine hundred and seven_," she said incredulously, "What, years?"

"Yes, yes I'm very old. But my point is..."

"No, it's not that. I would have just expected you to be older. You're always going on about how incredibly ancient and experienced you are but I mean...we have castles in Scotland older than that. You're not even as old as _Jesus_."

"Well, actually...but no, I probably shouldn't tell you that story. Anyway. No meeting, or talking to, or...or _snogging_ the past versions of people you've already met, ok? It can only lead to trouble."

"I won't if you won't," she said cheerfully. He glowered from under his quite remarkable eyebrows and waved her away in defeat.

"Oh and Doctor," she said before going into the kitchen to try and find something to eat that wasn't green, "I have good news."

"Yes?" he said dubiously.

"She's a _fantastic_ kisser."

* * *

If there's one effect meeting River Song had had on Amy Pond, it was to give her a new found appreciation for museums.

She and the Doctor were looking at a display of artifacts from the nitrogen peat bogs of Circinus 6 when a passing attendant suddenly stopped and stared at her like he'd seen a ghost. When she looked up at him he blanched and walked off, but he soon returned with another attendant and the two of them whispered in conference for a while before approaching her in trepidation.

"Excuse me madam," said the older looking of the two, "but would you by any chance be...Amy Pond?"

Oooh, was this when it turned out she was some intergalactically famous historical figure? That would be awesome. Well...unless she was famous in a bad way.

"Maybe," she said, "Who wants to know?"

"Uh...could you come this way? There's something you should see."

She looked at the Doctor, since he had more experience in telling the difference between the nervousness of "can I have your autograph" and that of "get her around the corner so we can cut off her head". He shrugged. How helpful.

They were led past the alien skeletons and preserved jetskis to a part of the exhibition they hadn't gotten to yet, where a section of the internal hull of a spaceship had been mounted to the wall and lit rather gaudily with lights. It looked ancient, and the little plaque said it had been recovered a hundred years ago after sitting in the bog for twelve thousand years. Burned black into the metal was the following message:

"Dear Amy, stuck in submerged spaceship at coordinates -31.98522,115.836239 at 10:45pm on January 25 2186. Will repay rescue with dinner. Love, River."

Under this it said "Please forward to Amy Pond" with an arrow pointing to a remarkably accurate monochrome image of her wearing a very silly expression. Amy suddenly remembered being rather tipsy and having her photo taken with some phone-computer-device... thing. She wasn't sure if it was flattering or weird that River had still had a copy of it three years later.

"Ha!" said the Doctor, "Now she's doing it to you too. Well, let's see what she's gotten herself into this time."

The TARDIS materialised into darkness. It had taken some time to find the ship, since while it had been at the given longitude and latitude it was also a good hundred meters below the surface of the bog. They were not the only ones looking for River, the rest of her archeological team had spent the last day in a panic after the moorings holding up the ancient starliner had collapsed. "We told her it wasn't safe yet, but..." the excavation director had sniffed, distraught, while the Doctor patted her comfortingly on the back. "Of course you did," he said.

The empty corridors echoed hollowly, the few functioning systems blinking with warning lights. It looked like the ship had been dead for some time.

"River?" shouted Amy. The air was cold and stale, and Amy started to feel ill after only a few minutes. She and the Doctor looked at each other with concern. As they rounded a corner a thin voice croaked "You're late."

They saw the message first, the crenelated edges looking strange in the flickering beam of the torch. River lay half sitting beneath it, the programmable laser she'd used humming quietly beside her. She looked much the same as she had the last time Amy had met her, if a little green.

Amy and the Doctor picked her up and helped her walk to the TARDIS.

"Ha!" she said, just before she fell into unconsciousness, "I _knew_ you were a time traveler. Real costumers don't have holes in their stockings."


	2. Chapter 2

Note: This has an accompanying illustration on my DeviantArt account.

This chapter was written after the end of Season 5 and thus has a slightly less cheery tone.

* * *

River woke to find herself in a remarkably ordinary bed, in an almost unbelievably ordinary room. It was decorated in the sort of generic pseudo-grecian style that had been all the rage a few years ago, the powder blue of the walls an almost exact match of that of her ex boyfriend's loungeroom, and what with the large print of a local artist whose name she couldn't quite remember on the wall and the dogeared copies of that murder mystery series everyone kept bugging her to read sitting on the dresser, she could almost imagine herself to be waking in the house of any number of her friends back in 22nd Century Surrey.

Except she wasn't in Surrey (or on Circinus 6 for that matter), she was in a _time machine_. One whose owners did not appear to be from her century at all. And thus this seemingly ordinary room was very extraordinary indeed.

After taking a shower in the ensuite (again, very ordinary, apart from seeming to use actual water via real old fashioned taps) she cobbled together a halfway acceptable outfit from the rather odd collection of clothes left on the end of the bed and wandered out into the time machine. She hadn't had much of a chance to take it in when she'd been rescued, what with having been about to die of asphyxiation. The door to her room opened onto a hallway which led to the giant central control room she remembered from her arrival, but in the other direction the hallway seemed to branch off in lots of other directions with all sorts of mismatched doors leading who knows where. It was _huge_.

"How on earth did you fit this into the starliner?" she asked Amy's companion, who appeared to be poking buttons at random on the sprawling ridiculous collection of controls that apparently ran the ship.

He looked up at her, beaming. "It's bigger on the inside."

Huh. So she hadn't imagined the tiny little blue doorway. For some reason this was almost harder to get her head around than the time travel, but there was no point gawking. The man's strangely ageless face and mis-matched clothing had stood out as _wrong_ to her back home on Earth, but surrounded by brass levers and bubbles of moving glass he seemed at home here, part of the whole absurd and beautiful machine. She wondered if he was human. River stuck out her hand. "I'm not sure we've been introduced, I'm River Song."

He looked at her oddly for a moment, a sort of half smile on his face, like he knew something he didn't. Being a time traveller he probably did. "Nice to meet you River," he said "I'm the Doctor."

She raised her eyebrows but didn't comment, when your parents saddle you with a name like _River Song_ you learn not to be judgemental. "Well, I'm very grateful to you and Amy for the rescue, Doctor," she said. She watched him pushing buttons and pulling levers for a while but if there was a pattern to it she couldn't make it out. "So," she asked, "How does it work?"

Physics had never been River's area of expertise but the explanation the Doctor gave involving dematerialisation and wobbly balls of stuff didn't bear much resemblance to what little she remembered of chrono-mechanics from school. He was a little smug about the fact that she didn't know how anything worked which didn't seem entirely fair. Fiddling with the knobs on a strange little fuzzy two dimensional monitor she said "You really are historical re-enactment geeks, aren't you? Unless colour television is going to become a lost art in the future." She looked at the Doctor quizzically. "When _are_ you from, anyway?"

"That is a surprisingly complicated question," he replied. "Well, for me, at any rate. I'm from all over the place. Amy really is from the 21st century, though, she's just travelling along with me for…a bit." He frowned and looked at her seriously. "Listen, about Amy. I know you two, before, were uh…and, well, she's kind of going through a difficult period emotionally right now. Just…try not to hurt her feelings."

"I certainly wasn't planning on it," said River. "She did just save my life." River thought back to the previous time she'd met Amy three years ago. She had seemed a bit…odd, her cheerfulness feeling like a thin veneer over some other darker emotion. River wondered how much time had passed since then for Amy. Still, she wasn't sure this Doctor should be going around making Amy's relationship decisions for her. "This isn't some jealous boyfriend thing, is it?" she asked.

"Ha!" said Amy, unexpectedly walking down from a staircase, "No, _I'm_ not his type." She waggled her eyebrows expressively at River and gave the Doctor a significant look. "Plus he's an alien. I'm not sure he's even a _boy_. Anyway, single and fancy free, that's me." Amy wrapped her arms around River like a hot redheaded python. "Glad to see you're up and about."

"Glad to _be_ up and about," said River. "I take it you got my note?"

"I was hardly going to ignore an offer of a free dinner," said Amy. "Very clever idea, that note. Though this is _his_ time machine, so you'd be better off writing to the Doctor next time, isn't that right _sweetie_?" "Hmm," replied the Doctor noncommittally.

Amy was smiling, yet gave a sigh of unexpected sadness before resting her head on River's shoulder. "Doct_or_," she wheedled, "Can we keep her? It gets so _boring_ when there's just the two of us and you're off fixing the flux capacitor or whatever."

It struck River for the first time that all she knew about these people was that they had access to absurdly advanced technology and weren't who they said they were, and that maybe that made them a little dangerous.

"Oh I didn't mean _keep_ you," said Amy, seeing her expression. "I'm not going to tie you up and make you my love slave or anything. Probably. I just thought you might like to travel with us for a bit. See the universe, travel through time, you know. Assuming the Doctor isn't going to be a big Jessy about paradoxes and the end of all existence again."

"Uh…" said River.

"No, I'm sorry, it's a bad idea," said the Doctor. "We should drop River back with her expedition as soon as possible." He smiled at River apologetically. "Nothing against you personally, River" he said, "You, uh, seem very nice."

Amy rolled her eyes and grabbed River's hand. "Well, then, we're going to go have breakfast. If that's alright with you, Mr Sensible Pants."

"Breakfast" turned out to be a collection of various odd foodstuffs wrapped in multicoloured paper from a machine down one of the corridors. Amy took River to a little walled garden and as they sat under the impossible sky she lay her head in River's lap and told her about the crack in her wall, and aliens in Venice, and the raggedy Doctor. River got the distinct impression she wasn't getting the full story but it was more than enough.

"You know, if anyone would believe me you'd make a great primary source for my thesis," she said.

"Oh, I see, so _that's_ why you called me out all this way," said Amy. "You needed help with your _homework_."

"Naturally," replied River. "Asphyxiation is one thing, but my funding has nearly run out. I must remember to put you in the acknowledgements, coming to save me across time and space is worth at least a paragraph."

"No mention of what a _spectacular_ snog I am?" asked Amy, leaning up on one elbow and reaching her other hand around River's neck to tangle in her hair.

"That's going to get it's own dedicated-" started River before being stifled my Amy's kiss. The roll River had been eating dropped from her hand onto the grass, forgotten, along with all thoughts of past centuries and alien ships.

Amy kissed like the world was ending, like it was the last thing she would ever do. She held onto River with a grip so tight it was almost painful, before pulling back and carefully running her fingers over Rivers face, scrutinising her features with a narrow-eyed intensity.

"You won't forget me, will you?" asked Amy.

"Never," said River. "I think you'd be more likely to forget me, with all the things you've seen."

Amy looked like she was about to say something then stopped. Her breath caught for a moment and then she turned away and wiped her eyes. "I don't know what's wrong with me this morning," she said.

River pulled Amy up into a hug and kissed her forehead. She barely knew Amy, certainly not well enough to demand to know what was wrong, but it still stung to see her in pain and not know how to help. "How about," she said "Rather than us just sitting here you show me what's behind some of those mysterious doors I passed on the way down the corridor."

Amy sniffed and smiled. "Wait until I show you the zoo," she said.

When they returned Amy managed to persuade the Doctor to take a detour before they took River back to her own time. After Amy's wild tales of her travels with the Doctor River was expecting some strange alien landscape or historic era in peril, but instead the doors opened onto a fairly ordinary looking street filled with little storefronts and mostly human shoppers. She could even understand the language.

"Is this…somewhere in South America?" she asked, looking at the almost familiar clothes and architecture.

"Not quite," replied the Doctor. "We're on Beta Caprisis: Fourth planet in the Gamma Delphinius system, in the year 2532. Welcome to the beautiful city of New Cotacachi, home of some of the best leatherworkers in the universe. Well, at this point in time anyway, they started resting on their laurels a bit a few decades after this, the quality went way down. Anyway: Amy, River, would you like to wander about for a bit? I have to go do some shopping."

"Come on!" said Amy, grabbing River's hand, "Let's go see if we can get into trouble so the Doctor has to come and save us."

"Hey!" said the Doctor.

"Oh, you know you love it," said Amy.

New Cotacachi was lovely, all palm trees and sunshine and full of happy looking people going about their business. As they walked the bustling streets River noticed lots of subtle and not so subtle signs that she was in the future, from the unfamiliar technology used to power a passing wheelchair to giant sky billboards extolling the virtues of some Earth Emperor she'd never heard of. When River expressed delight at how strange and advanced it all was compared to her normal life Amy laughed and pointed out that archeological digs on alien planets weren't exactly _normal_ by the standards of her time.

Things didn't go _quite_ according to Amy's plan: while they did get into trouble, by the time the Doctor found them trapped in the secret Draconian complex underneath the city, River had managed to program the alien's mind control ray to self destruct while Amy distracted the guards with a complicated story about being the Emperor's niece.

"How did you learn to do that?" he asked River, as the three of them sheltered behind a pillar in the wake of the explosion.

"I had a misspent youth," she replied, smiling mysteriously. Sometimes the Doctor needed reminding that he didn't know _everything_.

And then it was time to go.

"So…" said Amy, her hands behind her back as they stood awkwardly by the TARDIS doors. "We got you a present. Well, the Doctor got it but it was my idea. Sort of. To help you remember us." She presented River with a small box.

"Trust me," said River, as she opened the box, "I'm not going to…it's a book." She looked at the blank journal she'd been given, a little confused. The leather of the cover was a deep and intense blue, indented with squares, it looked a little like the TARDIS. What was she going to do with a book? Flipping the crisp white pages she realised that the first one had writing on it as well as little labeled drawings of Amy and the Doctor. It said:

_Λ Ψ, λ, Γ Ν π γ Met Amy Pond and the Doctor, saw through their cunning disguises._

_Λ ς, τ, Ξ ξ ω Ψ Stranded on an ancient starliner under a bog, I turned to graffiti. The Doctor and Amy luckily saw my note and came to rescue me, but I have since realised what a dangerous way this is to communicate and will never rely on it again._

_Λ Ω, υ, Φ β ζ η Foiled Draconian plot to brainwash the people of Beta Caprisis, was given this book, had empanadas for tea._

Underneath this, in a different hand and ink was written _Had mind blowing sex in the TARDIS swimming pool._

"I didn't know the TARDIS had a swimming pool," said River.

Amy grinned. "Well then, I guess I'll just have to show it to you before you go, won't I?"


End file.
